[weblacky]

So this is going to be a little off-the-wall. But does IRIX already has something built-in that causes user notifications in the form of alerts? I understand it doesn't really have widgets and things like that that we consider modern. But I know I've seen the system pop-up incredibly simple dialogs that contain an alert with a small amount of text information and a confirmation button of some kind. I've seen it for things like imminent shut down due to environmental monitoring problems and I know I've at least sometimes seen a thin console come up automatically to show optical drive sense failures, failing voltages, and things like that on the desktop, unprompted, without me having to run any special programs when I login.

I was daydreaming porting some simple OSS utilities that are already available on Linux/MacOS/Win32, as a "what if" mental exercise, and realized that realistically the point of these utilities is to alert the user that something is needing their attention, NOW. For the sake of argument let's say concepts like disk failure/monitoring, or UPS events like "UPS has just gone on battery", or perhaps designing special hardware to take up a PCI slot that runs fans and monitors temperatures around a system like octane that have multiple PCI slots but never had a monitoring system for their health. At the end of the day some of these are services that self manage but when things go horribly wrong they need to notify the user of what is going on and to begin system shut down or to at least warn them of impending failure due to whatever is happening.  

From what I recall of the desktop there's not really a widgets area and I'm not sure how programs like Xeyes work but I guess you could do maybe something like that to gain what I want. But I thought maybe there was already a subsystem to do simple alert messages that require user attention, that need to modify user behavior.

So let's say you spend the time developing the modular Kernel driver or adding in the system calls into existing OSS utilities to get them to work.  Great, so now you have a background service that maybe outputs text into a log somewhere, effectively useless if you expect the user to do something right now.

So at the end of this huge statement, what would be the easiest way the IRIX desktop has to produce a simple alert dialog from a system process that just needs to be acknowledged by the user that tells them that they need to do something right now. Whether that dialog is error or informational would be nice to control. But the point of the alert being this needs your attention and is time critical.  At the current time I don't see a need to get feedback of the user's choice. Simply throwing out a function that says "show this alert to the user and go on with my life" would suffice for what I'm thinking of. I don't need to present a bunch of choices and controls and then read back what the user selected.

That way if I end up doing anything I could use the built-in, existing, GUI alert mechanism in the operating system to create the very few alerts I need for the utilities to do their job if they're running using crontab or as an actual service.

[Raion]

I think that you can accomplish this with Tooltalk but I'm not sure if it's used extensively in the OS:

https://tech-pubs.net/SGI_Developer/book...#id5439315

[vishnu]

This is written in the worst type of tech-talk mumbo-jumbo. But, I guess if you work up the gumption to wade all the way through it, it could be useful.

[vishnu]

I think that you can accomplish this with Tooltalk but I'm not sure if it's used extensively in the OS:

http://tech-pubs.net/SGI_Developer/books...#id5439315

This is written in the worst type of tech-talk mumbo-jumbo. But, I guess if you work up the gumption to wade all the way through it, it could be useful.

EDIT: And now it's been deleted, oh well.

[Raion]

No it has not. There's something funky going on on certain browsers over http. Try SSL.